Thursday, October 11, 2018

S.C. Quail Restoration and Bird Dogs at Moree's

Jeff Dennis and guide Billy Benson in the field

A return trip to hunt quail at Moree’s Sportsman Preserve in
Chesterfield County on October 2 was nearly canceled due to storm damage from
Hurricane Florence. Just two weeks earlier this area known as Society Hill
received 24-inches of flooding rain, washing out some access roads. The
longtime manager at Moree’s is Mike Johnson, and he worked overtime to prep
their property and facilities for our hunt. Guide Billy Benson and I discussed
bird dog lineage during the entire morning hunt, since I own one of the English
Setters he raised eleven years ago at Moree’s.

“I have
been guiding here for 30 years now,” said Billy Benson of Florence. “Your dog’s
mother was named Roxy, and this 9-year old male named Hoss is from a separate
litter of puppies from Roxy. I watch the dogs each year to measure their
ability to hunt and Hoss seems primed and ready for another hunting season.
Aging is different for all dogs, but around age 11 is when I see it really slow
down my working dogs. Another guide here named Leroy Jordan uses English
Setters from the same lineage as your dog Chester.”

English Setter retrieves a bobwhite quailwhile Mike Giles watches

The SEOPA conference in Florence featured bobwhite quail as
a discussion topic with SCDNR’s small game biologist Michael Hook and Don
McKenzie of the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative (NBCI). Quail
population numbers have been in decline in every state of its range for
decades, but out of the failure to fully grasp this landscape scale problem, a
new resolve is forming to save our bird hunting culture. Songbirds
have also been identified in decline, and it turns out that they require the
same early successional habitat as bobwhite quail. A new management strategy
that regards both the gamebirds and the songbirds as a treasured resource is
uniting partners in conservation like never before.

To read the entire feature article in the newspaper click on Colletonian.